John Harvard Memorial

Artist:

Location:

Location

Neighborhood:

Charlestown

Type:

Memorial Plaque

Year:

1943

Medium:

Granite

Collection:

Funders:

Description:

John Harvard, dying in 1638, left his library and half his estate to the college that had been founded in Cambridge in 1636. In gratitude the college was renamed Harvard College. The John Harvard Memorial, a substantial, four-sided granite block, records the founding of Charlestown, where Harvard lived from 1637-1638, his bequest to what became Harvard College, and the college’s gift of the site to the City of Boston to create the John Harvard Mall park. Eight marble tablets set into the mall wall record aspects of Charlestown’s early history. The memorial and mall were dedicated in 1943.